In September 2008, in the woods outside the occupied Georgian town of Kareli, the fighters under my command demanded to see my documents. They refused to believe that a sitting member of parliament and former chief of the military police was fighting beside them as an ordinary rifleman. I produced my parliamentary credentials. They passed the card from hand to hand in silence.
Their disbelief has stayed with me for 18 years, not because they doubted who I was, but because, years later, I watched my entire nation believe something far less believable.
Russia’s tanks stopped 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) from Tbilisi in August 2008. The war lasted five days. Moscow seized territory — it occupies a fifth of Georgia to this day — but it did not take the country. Four years later, it took the country without firing a shot.
This March, the European Commission suspended visa-free travel for Georgian officials, the first use of its strengthened suspension mechanism anywhere, with the whole population possibly next. What Russian tanks and electronic warfare could not do in 2008 — sever Georgia from the West — is now being done from inside Tbilisi.
THE WAR PUTIN PROMISED WOULD NEVER REACH RUSSIA HAS REACHED SIBERIA
I watched every phase of this conquest from the inside: as a counterintelligence officer, as a soldier, and as a member of a parliament that was bought before it was defeated.
I know why the Russians never occupied Kareli in 2008, even as they installed a commandant, Major General Vyacheslav Borisov, in the larger city of Gori next door. My partisan detachment had dissolved after its first engagement — two men remained with me. So I used my counterintelligence training and built a legend: Through every channel I could reach, I spread word that the forests around Kareli held hundreds of American-trained guerrillas under my command. The Russians weighed the cost of forest warfare against hundreds of trained fighters and never came in. They announced my liquidation and hunted my family — they interrogated captured Georgian policemen over a photo album looted from my house. They were hunting an army that consisted of three men and a story.
They believed me. Remember that sentence.
Moscow had tried to take Georgia by politics once before: In 2003, it hoped to steer the Rose Revolution toward its own client, the Adjarian strongman Aslan Abashidze, and failed. But Moscow does not accept losses — it reschedules them.
After 2003, a billionaire named Bidzina Ivanishvili moved home to Georgia from Moscow, where he had made his fortune in 1990s banking and metals, and was known by the Russian name Boris. His wealth came to equal roughly a third of Georgia’s economy.
The “philanthropy” began at once: monthly stipends, often ten times a salary, for clergy, actors, scientists, athletes, doctors, television faces — anyone with a name and an audience. Then, financing for the state itself: the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and the Prosecutor’s Office. And then my ministry. Every officer of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security received a monthly cash supplement, rising with rank, collected in person at Cartu Bank, Ivanishvili’s private bank.
I know, because I collected it myself.
A private bank owned by a Moscow-made billionaire acquired the name, face, rank, and financial profile of every intelligence officer in the country — and taught each of us a habit of dependency. No foreign intelligence service could have designed a better card file. When I formally asked my superiors why this man was paying us, the answer nearly ended my career. The state trusts him, I was told. Who are you? That sentence is how influence operations win: The most dangerous asset is the one nobody is permitted to suspect.
On Oct. 7, 2011, as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood on Freedom Square in Tbilisi celebrating Georgia’s European future — I sat in the official loge — Ivanishvili announced he was entering politics to bring down the government. He carried three passports that day: Georgian, Russian, and French. The Georgian one was revoked four days later. The Russian one he gave up only weeks before a court ruling forced the issue. The French one, by all published accounts, he holds still. Within days, colleagues from the ruling parliamentary majority told me privately they could not “betray” him — one showed me his gifted SUV, another described his stipend. Their salaries came from the state. Their loyalty had another address.
The operation had a Washington front, too. Foreign Agents Registration Act filings show Ivanishvili paid over $3 million to five American public relations and lobbying firms, largely to demolish former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s democratic image. By election season, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was framing the vote as a litmus test of Saakashvili’s democracy. Washington’s pressure was well-intentioned, which is precisely why it worked. A good influence operation does not fight the values of its target — it borrows them.
Thirteen days before the vote, television screens filled with footage of prisoners tortured in Gldani prison. The country convulsed — the campaign was over that night. A Georgian journalist, Eliso Kiladze, later concluded on the record that the key scenes were staged — I present her findings as hers. The timing, no one disputes.
Ivanishvili’s party won on Oct. 1, 2012. U.S. senators observing for Washington went to Saakashvili’s residence the next day and pressed him to hand over power; Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) later recalled from the Senate floor: “he listened to us and he transferred the power peacefully.”
Washington celebrated a democratic milestone. Moscow celebrated the conclusion of a decade-long operation. One side believed it was celebrating democracy. The other knew it was celebrating strategy. Both were describing the same afternoon.
Within months, prosecutions swept the former government — Saakashvili himself would eventually sit in a Georgian prison. I arrived in the United States weeks after the vote and received political asylum. My relatives have been blacklisted from employment in Georgia ever since.
It took Washington twelve years to say officially what we had lived. In December 2024, the Treasury Department sanctioned Ivanishvili under Executive Order 14024 — the authority reserved for the Kremlin’s own enablers — for undermining Georgia’s democracy “for the benefit of the Russian Federation.” Today, his regime jails protesters and journalists, has frozen EU accession, and has begun consuming its own: a former prime minister imprisoned, the former security chief arrested. First the opposition, then the press, then each other.
CONGRESS FINALLY STOPS PRETENDING: TIME TO EXPOSE GEORGIA’S KREMLIN-LINKED PUPPET MASTER
My fighters doubted my identity. Russia never did — it announced my liquidation by name. Moscow understood something before the West did: States rarely die when the tanks arrive. They die when their citizens begin believing someone else’s story.
Russia did not lose the war in Georgia. It postponed victory until enough Georgians could be persuaded to deliver it themselves. That is why the second invasion is always quieter — and why Ukraine should study our file the way pilots study crash reports.
Emzar Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs (1996–2008), specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations, a former chief of Georgia’s military police, and a former Member of Parliament (2008–2012) representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the United States in 2012.